It is a common practice in ABAP to use MODIFY instead of INSERT and UPDATE. Do you do it too? Tell me why. Is it laziness? Is it fear? Is it just a matter of “whatever”? Or is it more like “screw it”?

INSERT and UPDATE are two radically different operations and should be treated as such.

Stop it! Stop using MODIFY for no good reason. I’ll give you two reasons why:

The first is that, while UPDATE requires locking objects to avoid concurrency, INSERT is a safe operation that doesn’t need them at all. Now, I’ve seen both situations: some use MODIFY without locking objects, which is a “let’s hope it doesn’t mess up” situation, and those that MODIFY with locking objects that aren’t really needed, which is a “whatever” situation. Both are examples of bad programming.

And the second is that you should strive to make your code easy to understand for those who come after you. When someone finds a MODIFY in code they don’t know, it better have a decent comment nearby to make it clear whether it’s inserting new or changing existing records, because otherwise you’ve just caused them a complicated problem: now they’re going to have a hard time trying to figure out what the hell you’re doing there. Hard work that you could have been avoided. I’ve been through this several times.

MODIFY is like CATCH cx_root. Both are pests that need to be eradicated.

I won’t go so far as to say that MODIFY should never be used. Perhaps in cases where performance is important and you have to process lots of rows that may be new or already exist. But otherwise, I don’t see the need for it. Do you?

Even if there are scenarios where MODIFY might make sense, they are exceptional and very specific. Surely not the case of most of the MODIFY I have come across and continue to come across.

And there are many. I’ve been on a project where there were so many and so problematic that they were considering doing a project just to replace them with INSERT or UPDATE, comme il faut.

Greetings from Abapinho.